Blog Post
I second everything that's been said here. The decision to phase out actions and webhooks seems to entirely disregard the user experience of building pipelines on a large scale and the massive level of frustration that comes with it.
I use pipelines for one and only one reason; when there is absolutely no other way to accomplish my goal. If it can be achieved via actions, webhooks, code pages, or even a third-party tool, I'll utilize those features over pipelines without hesitation. Why? Because, in actions and webhooks, my work will be reliably saved and my changes won't unexpectedly revert. I will not have to wait 10-20 seconds each time I want to add a new field. My action/webhook won't unexpectedly crash after spending hours perfecting it, and when there is a failure, I will be reliably notified. I don't need to worry about my action failing when I change a field name. I can easily access my actions and webhooks within my app rather than opening pipelines in the shared developer account and searching through hundreds to find the one I'm looking for. If I'm lucky, I remembered to tag it.
While the new pipeline builder does improve on some of these issues, it is far from where it needs to be, and it's shocking that those involved in this decision believe that we are anywhere close to ready for this change. The autosave feature is still unreliable, and it is just as likely to fail/crash for no discernable reason. The loading time to retrieve apps, tables and fields has not noticeably improved, as and many others have mentioned, neither has the trigger time. I'm also finding field usage reporting to be inaccurate even after the long-awaited improvements were made.
I sincerely hope our shared experiences and frustrations are taken into account, and either the decision to phase out actions and webhooks is rolled back, or the necessary improvements are made to pipelines well before the end of sale date.